Accent Positive

Letters from readers

December 9, 1996

IT SEEMS to me that, in your criticism of the Orange County Public School System, you are doing a disservice to the hundreds of hard-working dedicated employees who try to meet the needs of the community's children and youth, sometimes against tremendous odds.

There are many good things happening in the schools. For example, the Florida Legislature recently mandated that all entering seventh-graders have a series of three Hepatitis B immunizations. Knowing that the probability of all 10,000 sixth-grade students being immunized by August is very slight, a local immunization coalition, the health department and the school district are arranging to bring free immunization clinics to the school campuses before school is out this year. Recruiting nurses, getting parent permission, scheduling not one but three shots per student, is not an easy job. Yet it is necessary so that no seventh-grader will be excluded from school next year.

I've spent hundreds of dollars and 24 years being trained, and I used to be proud of my 27 years of hard work in public education. You are driving quality educators out of the profession and doing harm to the already-low self-esteem of many dedicated people. It's time you recognized them instead of reporting only the negative. Shelby Morrison, ORLANDO